Katarzyna Olewińska, Uniwersytet Opolski
The concepts of time and reality on the basis of
William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf’s selected novels
Koncepcja czasu i rzeczywistości na postawie wybranych dzieł Williama Faulknera i Virginii Woolf
The article analyses the concepts of time and reality according to the antipositivist tendencies and sensibility on the basis of Wil- liam Faulkner and Virginia Woolf’s selected works. The main aim is an attempt to prove that modernist writers used the philosophical perceptions of time and reality in their novels. The first part of the article presents the ideas of time analysed by philosophers and thinkers such as Henri Bergson, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl and Wilhelm Dilthey. The second part focuses on finding the philos- ophers’ particular ideas in the selected novels by William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf
Keywords: time, reality, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf.
W artykule dokonano analizy koncepcji czasu i rzeczywistości według tendencji i wrażliwości antypozytywistycznych na podsta- wie wybranych dzieł Williama Faulknera i Virginii Woolf. Głównym celem artykułu jest próba udowodnienia tego, że modernistyczni pisarze w swoich dziełach zawarli filozoficznee idee czasu i rzeczy- wistości. Część pierwsza prezentuje koncepcje czasu przeanalizo- wane przez filozfów i myślicieli takich jak: Henri Bergson, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl czy Wilhelm Dilthey. W drugiej części, skupiono uwagę na odnalezieniu poszczególnych koncepcji po- wyższych filozofów w wybranych powieściach Williama Faulknera i Virginii Woolf.
Słowa kluczowe: czas, rzeczywistość, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf.
Typ artykułu: artykuł recenzyjny.
Źródło finansowania badań i artykułu: środki własne Autorki.
Cytowanie: Olewińska K., (2018) The concepts of time and reality on the basis of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf’s selected novels „Rynek-Społeczeń- stwo-Kultura” nr 2(28), s. 106-111,
https://kwartalnikrsk.pl/Artykuły/RSK2-2018/RSK2-2018-Olewinska-The-concepts-of-time-and-reality-Faulkner-Woolf-novels.pdf
STRE SZ CZENIE ABS TRA C T
Introduction
Analysing, interpreting and creating reality is impossible without being an inseparable part of it. Therefore, coming to conclusions abo- ut the surrounding world is always subjective. Likewise time was re- garded as part and parcel of human life by many antipositivist philo- sophers and thinkers. They suggested that reality and science may be regarded as part of the world which is limited to individual perception of every human being (Dogan 2013: 249-251). The interest in the concepts of time and reality has been observed not only among the antipositivist theoreticians but also among the particular modernist writers. Referring to my analysis of the notions of time according to Henri Bergson, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl and Wilhelm Dil- they and after delving into selected works by William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf, I have observed that the same ideas about temporali- ty, reality and consciousness might be found in the prose of the prose writers mentioned above. Did the prose writers knew the philosophi- cal concepts of time? Did they deliberately used them in their pieces of writings? The main aim of this article is to attempt to prove that William Faulkner as well as Virginia Woolf modelled a few of their novels on the concepts of the antipositivist philosophers and thinkers.
Reflections on time
Because rationalism and science were for Henri Bergson just the abstract notions, he attempted to convince many other thinkers that human experience and intuition are more meaningful than the-
oretical concepts. One of his most popular ideas is that time is real (Deleuze 1988: 78-80). Bergson claims that every episode in human life develops the ready-made reality that has been somehow hidden before the event happened. The pace of time, the same as the pace of actions rely on uncovering the destiny that has been rooted and covered until the particular second of time comes; this means that the time has been presented as a filmstrip that is unreeling at the particular moment of human life when the “right time” comes (Koła- kowski 2008: 12-13). For Bergson, life in the universe is portrayed as a creative process in which new and unexpected things happen in every second. Nevertheless, Bergson implies that the time of physics is not real. In science as well as in daily life people equate time with space, as the chain of homogeneous dots placed one after another in an infinitely long line. A concept of the real time, regarded by Ber- gson as a durée (real duration), is neither homogeneous nor divida- ble; time is this what every human being is – and we are capable of knowing it only from the direct experience (Kołakowski 2008: 13-15).
What is more, time is real due to the existence of memory in which the whole past is gathered. In the abstract time, present in the subject of physics, nothing happening at one moment is connected with what happens in another one. Things which happen are set one next to another in a line. With durée, nothing is lost or omitted and nothing is also reversible. Everything that happens in life becomes the past at the moment of happening, and everything that takes place is new and unrepeatable. If the matter of the past disappears, but its memory stays alive and if the memory is not the part and parcel of the matter, it seems to be probable that the human mind acts inde- pendently from the body and may endure its death (Kołakowski 2008:
14-17). Undoubtedly, antipositivist perception of time was going bey-1.
ond the Cartesian and Kantian ways of perceiving the reality. Accor- ding to them, the human mind was regarded as an organ of the body which helps the body to fight against the obstacles we encounter in the environment. The main aim of our mind is to gather the expe- riences in time by storing them in our memory (Kołakowski 2008: 18- 19). Moreover, Bergson considered time the “organ of life.” The only way a human being may meet the reality is by intuition rather than analysis. Although the human mind, as well as the concept and the pace of time, are the effects of the biological evolution, the process of evolution is the creation of human mind (Kołakowski 2008: 19).
In his works, Bergson attempted to explain the notions of life, mind and time. No matter how mysterious or elusive these concepts might seem to be, each of them is visible in human experiences. In every experience there is an element of the indestructible persistence of memory which cannot be eliminated (Kołakowski 2008: 19).
In his Matter and Memory, Bergson states that if the time is real, the past exists only in our memory and minds. Nevertheless, if the world was not observed by the conscious observer who watches the passage of time, no change or passage of time from one state to another would be noticed. Such elements can be noticed only by way of memory and consciousness which keep the world going (Ko- łakowski 2008: 56-60). In this case, if the change of the passage of time is observed, it leads to the need of measuring time without any measurable possibilities. This leads to the psychological capability of measuring time and the point that each person measures his/her time in his/her own individual way according to his/her own psycho- logical clock (Bergson 2012: 62-70).
Another philosopher whose concept of time was regarded as the prominent idea of the twentieth century was Martin Heideg- ger. He refers to the term of Dasein which means being in time and space (Michalski 1978: 35-36). Being for Dasein is like a task to be completed, like an opportunity and like going beyond itself. It is not a permanent and stable element which allows itself to stay rigid and unchangeable since being is a process of continuous change. If Da- sein “is” it means “it changes.” Existence is a process in which being appears during the process of being. The sense of existence may be understood only through existence (Michalski 1978: 41). Time, there- fore, is a mean of counting movements. It is presented as a sequence of “nows.” Certainly, it is not one and the same “now” since in such a case any movement would be possible. “Now” defines time as “be- fore” and “after.” Every “now” is on the one hand “the next minu- te-not now-anymore,” and on the other hand “in this moment-not now-yet.” Taking all into account, “now” is both “earlier” and “later”
(Michalski 1978: 169).
Taking this account into consideration, one may assume that time is perpetual and infinite. It is a continuous and incessant sequ- ence of “nows” in which every “now” is defined as “earlier” and
“later.” In this account, time has no ending nor beginning (Michalski 1978: 168). Therefore, the everyday experience seems to approve that view. When people await for something eagerly, this period of awaiting is defined as “duration,” and this time of awaiting seems to be “empty.” Bearing in mind that every human being may dispense his or her amount of time and fill it with the particular events, one may assume that time is empty and awaits for being filled (Michalski 1978: 168). If one says that time passes, it means that it is connected
with the past and if something happened, it will not return. Never- theless, in order to understand the passage of time, comprehending the notions of “before” and “after” is not enough. For the passing time, significant is not only the sequence of time, but also the rela- tion between what was and what will be as well as distinguishing past from the future. In the passing time, time in which this what happened will not return, there is an assumption which emphasises not only “earlier” and “later” but also this what “was” and this what
“will be” (Michalski 1978: 169). Heidegger in his Being and Time sug- gests to focus only on the aspect of “being” since he searches for the answer to the question what being is. The answer he suggests is saying that being is based on the phenomenon of consciousness.
Every being is present if one is conscious of its presence. Heidegger gives the example of chair which exists and it might be said that its being is present for the human who is aware of it (qtd. in Michalski 1978: 175-177).
Another philosopher who dealt with the question of time was Edmund Husserl. He perceived time as inner time-consciousness, described as the pervasive temporality which is the major source of human being’s experience. The theory of time proposed by Hus- serl refers to the notions of “flux” and “flow” which derive from the
“physical space and objects” and are “spread” in that space (Lara- bee 2010: 2). The concept of “physical Objects” refers to the mental processes take place in human mind and are able to be spread in time due to the spreading possibilities of consciousness. Time, accor- ding to Husserl, may have two dimensions: external (time measured by clock in the world) and internal (the feeling of the passage of time in human consciousness). Those aspects may be divided into three levels: “worldly object time,” “inner time of immanent tem- poral Objects,” and “absolute consciousness of time itself.” Husserl understands time as a “double flow within temporalisation itself”
(Larabee 2010: 2). The double flow consists of internal time and in- ternal time-consciousness and they belong to the concept of internal consciousness temporality. Ubiquitous time consists of “Objective time” which is considered the real one in which one may distinguish elements such as duration and alternation. Taking the Husserlian theory of internal time into consideration, one may notice that “the continuum of inner time flows horizontally” and internal time-con- sciousness flows vertically. They intersect at the point which is called
“Now” and in the very moment of becoming “Now” they become the past. In other words, “Now” or the present does not exist and a good example for that would be the example of the thought (Lar- rabee 2010: 2). When human being thinks of something, this created thought is never present since it becomes the past at the very mo- ment of thinking about it.
Another element of internal temporality in which the vertical line intersects the horizontal one at the point of “now” is division of the temporal consciousness into three phases: retention (from the past), impressional consciousness (from Now) and protention (from the future). Being aware of the possibilities of the passage of internal time and consciousness is essential in understanding the complexity of human life and human experiences. One must become fully awa- re of the fact that everything what s/he thinks about becomes the past at the very moment of thinking about it. Therefore, if human thoughts shift only from past to the present, it is possible to say that the present is an abstract and it does not exist.
Reflections on reality
According Wilhelm Dilthey’s point of view, the notions of tem- porality and reality cannot be treated as an unproblematic element of the philosophy. He delves into them in order to find the symbols of the deep, experiencing reality. It is all connected with the con- cept of metaphysics that refers to the ability to feel the fragility of life, time and finiteness, which is possible to understand only thro- ugh experiencing life (Lorenc 2008: 34). The philosopher does not attempt to explain the concept of life or time. Nevertheless, he at least wants to understand some parts of it but particular elements stay unfathomable. He refers to the ideas of Schleiermacher who presents some kind of balance between the concept of life and the concept of thought. Similarly, Dilthey states that he starts from life that he experiences himself and attempts to determine its meaning and content. The main idea of Dilthey’s philosophy is to take the re- ality and time as it exists with humility and to let his way of thinking accept it as it comes (Lorenc 2008: 37-38). What people may sense as the spiritual creatures in terms of the psychological and historical aspects is full and real experience (Lorenc 2008: 38).
Dilthey criticises human limitation of time and temporality of life. For the philosopher, this is not a natural way of going beyond metaphysics but it is rather connected with the spirit of time. The basic element of the time when people live is a sense of tempo- rariness of reality. Human being may experience the reality and the passage of time only internally. This concept has been called
“the idea of phenomenology” and it says that everything which is unknown for a human is a fact of an unconsciousness. Therefore, every human is capable of experiencing the psychological passage of time internally which is totally different from the time that can be measured (Lorenc 2008: 40-41). The mystery of the world is its individuality that is inextricable. Overcoming the limitation of time may enable people to go beyond the limitations of an individual life and conventional point of view. Thus, people may be free from their own limitations. On the other hand, Dilthey implies that time is ultimate, and it is something that the human being is not able to go beyond, something what people ought to start from. Time is eve- rything that exists in the human consciousness and its experience (Lorenc 2008: 46).
Dilthey states that “life” is a notion used in order to describe everything what people experience from the external and internal point of view. Each person has his or her own “psychological life”
which is manifested in the situations when people say: “I feel that I am living,” “I want to live,” or “I do not want to live anymore”
(qtd. in Lorenc 2008: 47). Life, the philosopher emphasises, can- not be described as a concept that fulfil human needs since it has many sides and is subordinate to the changes and surprises. It is not possible to go beyond the basic essence of life as there is no such a thing like the essence of life. Life has two meanings – it consists of what takes place in the human mind. It is what people expe- rience subjectively, but it also has its own holistic dimension which constitutes the substance of the history and the passage of time.
Life is something intimate which cannot be analyzed or investigated (Lorenc 2008: 48). The same refers to the time in life that cannot be analyzed or explained by terms and words. Dilthey implies that time and life are like the unsolved mysteries. All senses, investigations
and thinking are based on what cannot be investigated. Life and time cannot be explained by any explanations and formulas as well as time cannot go beyond life in which exists. It is not possible to go back beyond life and time itself, the same as it is not possible to go beyond the notions that have been created by the human being and analyze concepts that go far beyond human thinking and being (Lorenc 2008: 53-58).
As I have stated at the beginning of the article, the perceptions of time and reality, described above, may be found in the lives of protagonists introduced by William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf in their novels. I will make and attempt to prove that they both used Bergson, Heidegger, Husserl and Dilthey’s ideas of reality and tem- porality in their works. The first good example of the idea of sub- jectivity of reality and time is William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury in which the author depicts four different ideas of reality on the examples of four main characters of the novel and their points of view. Faulkner described God as existing “both in eternity and in the now;” which may suggest that he himself deeply believed in Bergson’s theory of time. In addition, Bergson explained that eter- nity is the present moment which includes the past and the future at the same time (qtd. in Messerli 1974: 19). Faulkner distinguished two concepts of time: transcendent (mythical time) and durational (individual time). In The Sound and the Fury there is always the pre- sent moment which is “suspended in time” and “eaten by the past events” which comes back as memories, and there is no future. The only order of the action is the order “of heart.” The lack of future time may suggest that Faulkner wants to forget time and give his characters no freedom of action and choices. The world created in the novel has no future time and it is a transcendent one, unrealistic and nonsensical where the characters want to escape from (qtd. in Messerli 1974: 19). As Sartre notices in his Time in Faulkner: The So- und and the Fury, “transcendence is the only possibility,” therefore, he views Faulkner’s reality as the one that has a “missing link” in a form of the “lived future.” Sartre attempts to argue that the world without future is nonsensical (Sartre 1960: 225-228).
One may assume that Faulkner’s characters do not live in their past since characters such as Quentin live their past in the present.
The characters in Faulkner’s work are not determined by the past because they are created by their past events. It is possible that Faulkner was inspired by Bergson and his theory of durée. Never- theless, one must be cautious when interpreting Faulkner’s work in the light of the Bergsonian idea of duration. Nonetheless, philoso- phers such as Bergson would assume Faulkner’s works to be written in the duration presented by a “lived time” that constantly changes.
Change is portrayed as the rule which means that characters such as Quentin are not able to accept this order of things since they are not able to accept all changes that occur in humans’ lives. They continually look for stability which has been described by them as
“the perfect and dead world.” The mixture of Quentin’s past, future and present events leads to his self-destruction. For him, the past is an inseparable part of the present, and from the religious point of view, life is viewed as a whole. Faith which is epitomized only due to human’s ability to imagine things, resists the passage of time. The main difference between Quentin and Dilsey is that Dilsey “tran- scends time” whereas Quentin is unable to accept and experience it. Faulkner’s acknowledgements that he was inspired by the Berg-
sonian concept of time seem to be illogical since Bergson’s notion of time views life “as lived not transcended” and is not so dynamic whereas in the novel, Dilsey transcends life rather than lives. Benjy, on the other hand, experiences past as present, hence for him, time does not exist at all. Quentin, on the other hand, is tormented by time and wants to eliminate it. Jason sees time through the prism of money, one for him time is mechanical. Dilsey, however, views time as a continuum including Christ’s birth, the present moment and past as well as the future time. These variable views of time evidence the contrast between durational versus transcendent;
nevertheless, Dilsey’s conception of time links both of them. Disley is a type of a practical woman who works hard. Her religion and beliefs concern death, the end of the world and the ultimate destiny of mankind. She plays a certain role in the novel among the other characters. She is in a constant movement between stairs, kitchen and a dining room, and fulfils the needs of never satisfied Bejny, Jason and Mrs. Compson. One may notice that in all her actions throughout the novel, her sense of time is a fully internal one. Dil- sey gives the perception of being the one who is responsible for correcting the kitchen clock.
Another character of The Sound and the Fury whose perception of time is regarded compelling is Benjy Compson. The possible cha- os which might be noticed in the section about him is considered a “vertical order” (Bleikasten 1995: 87). Referring to Benjy, Bergson explains the difference between “mathematical time and human consciousness of time.” The author states:
It is the t-th moment only that counts – and that will be a mere instant. What will flow on the interval – that is to say, real time – does not count, and cannot enter into calculation. If the mathe- matician tries to divide the interval using the calculus of the dif- ferential, he is still always speaking of a given moment – a static moment, that is – and not of flowing time (Bergson 1998: 26).
The term of duration might be used to describe Quentin’s stre- am-consciousne1ss and his sense of time which is present in his narration. Therefore, Quentin’s section can be described as being fully Bergsonian. In order to understand how Benjy perceives time, it is necessary to imagine that it is possible to separate past me- mories from present moment. In Creative Evolution Bergson spe- culates “if our existence were composed of separate states with an impassive ego to unite them, for us there would be no duration.”
This is the way Faulkner sees Benjy’s perception of time and his ego.
The author explains that the ego which does not change, cannot be endured. He further writes, “our duration is not merely one instant replacing another; if it were, there would never be anything but the present – no prolonging of the past into the actual, no evolution, no concrete duration” (Bergson 1998: 6-7). Duration, according to Ber- gson, is not independent of space and not available for the reflecti- ve consciousness. Applying the philosopher’s concept to Benjy, his consciousness has been presented as the reflective one. Benjy is the reflection of Faulkner’s “attempt to envision an existence [which is]
composed of separate states with an impassive ego to unite them”
(Bergson 1998: 65). Everything which concerns Benjy, allows the reader to see the real relationship between narrative and time. As Faulkner attempts to show, the character may possess the dura- tion for a short period of time. The duration may be reflected by
the stream of consciousness while the narrative is “already bound by the structured time or the protagonist’s experience. Faulkner did not use the stream-consciousness narrative in order to depict Benjy’s deepening trauma. He portrayed Benjy, as a character, for whom present is like a stimulus which allows him to go back to the particular memories from the past.
Another modernist writer whose perception of time was con- sidered atypical was Virginia Woolf. One may see the similarities in her perception of reality and time with the ideas of Henri Bergson.
In her A Writer’s Diary, she wrote, “and time shall be utterly oblite- rated; future shall somehow blossom out of the past. One incident – say the fall of the flower – might contain it. My theory being that the actual event practically does not exist – nor time either” (Woolf 2003: 164). A characteristic feature of Woolf’s writing was an unc- lear expression of time in each of her novels. She very rarely used such elements as clocks measuring the time. She usually presented the passage of time by providing the examples of the natural cycles of flowers, watching snails or changes of daytime.
Virginia Woolf, in her works, divided reality into two types: the first one, connected with the daytime, time measured by clock and flux, and the second one, connected with the time of night, intuition and measured psychologically with no permanent rules. In her no- vels, she provided a notion of “the moments of being” which can be distinguished by humans in their lifetimes and she put an effort in order to analyze this concept. Moreover, she tried to discuss the concept of the memories from the childhood I her essay entitled
“A Sketch of the Past.” In that work, she recollects that dividing life into “cotton-wool” of live and the sudden, stunning “moment of being” was familiar to her from the early years of her childhood (Schulkind 1976: 68). She wrote, “I suppose, that my memory sup- plies what I had forgotten, so that it seems as if it were happening independently, though I am really making it happen” (Schulkind 1976: 67). Therefore, one may notice that variable ways of her writing were not her methods of writing but rather the perspective she was able to acquire in her life. Virginia Woolf notes:
What then has remained interesting? Again those mo- ments of being. There was the moment of the puddle in the path; when for no reason I could discover, every- thing suddenly became unreal; I was suspended; I could not step across the puddle; I tried to touch something; the whole world became unreal. (qtd. in Schulkind 1976: 90).
In one of her novels, The Waves, one may notice fragment which describes a similar situation. When Rhoda ascertains that Percival died, the reader may read:
“There is the puddle,” said Rhoda, “and I cannot cross it. I hear the rush of the great grindstone within an inch of my head. Its wind roars in my face. All palpable forms of life have failed me.
Unless I can stretch and touch something hard, I shall be blown the eternal corridors forever. What, then, can I touch? What brick, what stone? And so draw myself across the enormous gulf into my body safely (Woolf 1978: 107).
The examples in which Virginia perceived herself as being se- parated from the reality were very common not only for her but also for her character Rhoda. They had a tendency to question their
identities since they perceived reality as an obscure image. Whe- reas they considered themselves being part of reality, the sudden feeling of being distinct from it made them insecure and they felt the need to touch something real in order to find an evidence for their own existence. This may be connected with Woolf’s division of time into time measured by clock and time measured psychologi- cally. There is no proof that Virginia Woolf read Heidegger’s books, nevertheless, the way she perceived reality and time may confirm the similarities in their ideas. One of the things which Woolf re- garded as “real” were her books. She found that they “happen”
in the passing time. She attempted to turn them into a moment of being-time which allowed her to be alive. Certainly, such cha- racters as Mrs Dalloway, Peter Walsh, Ramsay and Lily, Eleanor Pargiter and several others were accompanied by their personal memories. Nevertheless, despite personal memories, Woolf pro- vided her character with other indicators of the time passage. In Orlando, protagonists experience historical memories, in Between the Acts, characters’ minds can go back to the pre-history, and in The Voyage Out, the novelist provides an idea of regaining to the mythical world beneath the sea. In a few other novels such as Ja- cob’s Room, The Waves, The Years and To The Lighthouse she also explored the concept of time.
In order to write Jacob’s Room, Virginia Woolf started to look for the new technique since as she claimed in her A Writer’s Diary, that was going to be a work with “no scaffolding; scarcely a brick to be seen; all crepuscular, but the heart, the passion, humour, eve- rything as bright as fire in the mist” (Woolf 1954: 54). She decided to leave the traditional style she used to write The Voyage Out and Night and Day in order to convey her idea of the flux of time. After the two novels mentioned above, her fiction had no fixed plots as well as the events were sometimes not connected. Plot and the action of the events were not ordered in time and space.
Jacob’s Room, which is characterized by no plot and no co- nventional style, is regarded as the rejection of all fundamental values of life which formerly were established crucial. When she started to write Jacob’s Room, she did not expect it be such a diffi- cult task to be accomplished. In her A Writer’s Diary, she claimed that a new technique she wanted to present in the novel was much more difficult than it earlier supposed to be. During writing, she admitted herself, “What I’m doing, it is probably being done better by Mr. Joyce” (Woolf 1954: 24).
Jacob’s Room presents the story of Jacob Flanders as well as all situations which happened to him from his childhood to his death during the World War One. Although, the action depicts Jacob’s childhood at the seaside, his studies, love affairs, travelling to Fran- ce and Greece, as well as his death, neither plot nor episodes have been presented. The new writing experience for Woolf was also the style in which she did not provide the chronological order of events.
The novel consists of fourteen parts and each of them ends with a change of time or space. Each part characterizes with the changes of the protagonists’ points of view. Each character presents his or her own point of view and then it is shifted to the narrator who provides the commentary to what has been presented.
In Jacob’s Room, Woolf wanted her concept of time, which according to her is measured by human minds, to be emerged. The novelist attempted to present that not connected events from the
past and present may occur in human mind, move and repeat. Cha- racters in Woolf’s novel are capable of going back to the past thro- ugh memories. There is a scene in which Jacob goes to the chapel during his studies in at Cambridge, and he looks as the glass win- dows which remind him of lantern and his childhood when he used to catch moths at dusk. The readers may notice that memories from the past shaped characters’ present personalities. Another example may be when Jacob found sheep’s jaw at the beach, and despite his mother’s disagreement, he took the jaw home. That incident caused that every time Jacob sees the image of the jaw of the sheep, he recollects that situation. What is more, the idea of going back to the past is being hold and repeated throughout the story. An example of this may be the situation in which, at the end of the novel, Jacob’s room is being cleaned, and his friend, Bonamy, looks through the window, and cries “Jacob! Jacob!” This scene may bring the reader back to the beginning of the novel in which Archer looks for his brother among the rocks and shouts “Jacob! Jacob!”.
Not without reason Virginia Woolf chose the place of the plot near the sea during the meaningful periods of the character’s lives.
The sea may be seen as a symbol of eternity and immortality as it outlives all generations and stays unchanged. The sea served the novelist as an image of the flow of life as time in the novel goes forward and backward the same as waves on the sea. All characters of Jacob’s Room have a sense of continuity and fluidity of time thro- ugh their experiences and actions. Each character is a link to other characters whom he had contact with. In order to support her idea, Woolf provides a variable presentation of times, spaces, protago- nists and events and puts them together so as they create unity.
She claims herself in the novel, “But if you look at the steadily, multiplicity becomes unity, which is somehow the secret of life”
(Woolf 1954: 82). In the work, the novelist provided different spa- ces and different points of view at the same time. An example for this is moment when Mrs. Flanders is finishing to write her letter while Steele is being in a hurry to finish painting the portrait of her before she moves. Meanwhile, Archer is trying to call Jacob while Jacob is at the beach. Jacob’s Room is the first novel in which Woolf applied the Bergsonian concept of time which shows the difference between time measured by clock and time measured by human mind. One may observe that variable presentations of the clock time and spatial time within the novel may impede the flux of time.
Furthermore, other novels Orlando and The Waves by Virginia Woolf are characterized by the presentation of continual time and continual characters’ existence which are opposite to the chrono- logical events measured by clock. Woolf considered both present and past as interconnected elements which can be treated as the one. The characters, according to her, may change depending on how much past or present influence them. As has been stated in A Writer’s Diary, Orlando is an example of the novel in which the past perpetually affects the present. One may assume that the no- velist was influenced by the psychologist Carl Jung and his idea of continuity of time. Woolf’s idea of cohesion between people living in the present and humans of affected by the past is similar to Jung’s theory of collective unconscious. The psychologist assu- med that pres-existing forms are dormant in every human being’s mind. These forms are the same for every human and stay in the unconsciousness until they are awaken by the particular stimulus.
In The Waves, Virginia Woolf made an attempt to portray the concept of continuous stream. Six protagonists experience the stre- am of time through their travel from their childhood to their adu- lthood. On the contrary to the flux of time, the novelist presented the events and situations of the characters as if they were the tips of the waves or moments which take place, rather than the conti- nuous actions. Each wave is a representation of different character from the very beginning of their lives, childhood, development, future plans or expectations, fulfillment, till the end of collapse.
The author described the crucial moments of lives of the characters which include living together, school years and separations, rappro- chement in the London restaurant after finishing school, different life paths and the final reconcilement at Hampton Court in their adulthood. One may notice that the course of the sun on the sky seems to be similar to the stages of life of every human being. The narration of the novel emphasizing the passing time measured by the course of the sun on the sky seems to have the same meaning as a clock which measures the time chronologically. In A Writer’s Diary, the novelist provides an explanation why she put “people against time and the sea” (Woolf 2003: 140). The sound of waves symbolizes a timeless voice which strikes time against the shore and outlives the six characters Susan, Bernard, Rhoda, Neville, Louis and Jinny. Rhoda attempts to illustrate the events she experiences which take place one after another. In The Waves, she describes,
“I perceived from your coats and umbrellas, even at a distance, how you stand embedded in a substance made of repeated moments run together” (Woolf 1931: 222).The element highlighted in both Orlando and The Waves is the continuity of time. One may notice that Woolf’s idea of the continual passage of time is similar to Ber- gson who, in his Duration and Simultaneity, stated that world is an
“indefinite canvas upon which images can be drawn indefinitely”
(Bergson 1965: 59).
Conclusions
Taking all into consideration, it is possible to assume that both William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf used the philosophi- cal concepts of time, proposed by the antipositivist philoso- phers and thinkers, in their novels. The idea of constant change, transcendentalism, and the references to the psychological and physical time are clearly visible in The Sound and the Fury. Whe- reas, the suggestion of the future which results from the past, the differences between unchronological time events measu- red by psychological clock and the chronological actions measu- red by the hour hands, as well as the concept of an infinite time are noticeable in Virginia Woolf’s novels. This all may suggest that both novelists had some knowledge about and – to some extent – were aware of the concepts of time and reality analysed by Henri Bergson, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl and Wilhelm Dilthey.
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